Taylor Swift-Quake: Fans Cause Seismic Activity at Seattle Concert
“I shake it off, I shake it off,” Taylor Swift sang. And boy did her fans deliver.
A Taylor Swift concert in downtown Seattle last weekend shook the ground so hard, it registered signals on a nearby seismometer roughly equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, seismologists said.
“It’s certainly the biggest concert we’ve had in a while,” said Mouse Reusch, a seismologist at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors earthquake activity in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re talking about 70,000 people and all the music and paraphernalia associated with the concert.”
The so-called “Swift Quake” recorded a maximum ground acceleration of roughly 0.011 meters per second squared, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University.
Seismologists use acceleration to measure ground vibrations, which are then converted to the more conventional Richter scale, the common measurement for earthquakes.
Source: The New York Times
